![]() It’s “notoriously a way of not taking women seriously and not engaging with them as equals, as human beings with a will, with a desire,” she said.Įven when they’re obviously not sinister, crushes are sometimes seen as a bit … pathetic. And some of the most famous unrequited lovers-Petrarch Werther Quasimodo, from The Hunchback of Notre Dame Orsino, from Twelfth Night-are men putting women on an impossible pedestal their affection has understandably become associated with an “objectifying male gaze,” Sara Protasi, a philosopher at the University of Puget Sound, told me. The passion sometimes feels dark and out of control, often verging on abusive to its target. But their stories haven’t necessarily aged well. Many of these kinds of yearning admirers throughout history and myth were portrayed as noble, their suffering dignified. Goethe’s 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a man desperately pining for a married woman, became the first German international best seller and went on to inspire a generation of Romantic writers. (Narcissus was punished by developing an unending crush on his own reflection, which could never love him back.) The early-Renaissance poet Petrarch wrote more than 300 sonnets about a woman named Laura whom he’d supposedly glimpsed in a church service-but never actually knew. Greek mythology is full of them: Take the story of Echo, the nymph who, spurned by Narcissus, fled into the forest and faded away until all that was left was her voice. And sometimes, it serves a purpose entirely separate from the actual pursuit of a romantic relationship.į or millennia, unrequited crushes have been a staple of fable, literature, and poetry. The truth, though, is that an unrequited crush is not always unhealthy or unfair to its object. For people in a monogamous relationship, having one can feel like a crisis, or a threat to their partner. They can seem adolescent their one-sidedness can appear a little sad, even creepy. It was about the feeling: the sweet, hopeful rush.Ĭrushes sometimes garner suspicion. ![]() Whether they were reciprocated wasn’t really the point. These glimmers helped us power through the seemingly endless tundra of uneventful singlehood. Anytime we glimpsed a light at the end of our tunnel of romantic numbness, we’d text one another: Glimmer of hope!!!! The hope was that these crushes-which were rarely communicated to their subjects-signaled that our hearts might someday soften up and become, once again, hospitable to life. Glimmers came whenever we felt a giddy kick of affection-maybe for a friend of a friend, or the bartender at our favorite place, or the pottery-class buddy at the next wheel over. This was the era, though, when we started using the phrase glimmer of hope. Had we simply grown incapable of that kind of feeling? We imagined that our jaded little hearts might look like peach pits, shriveled and hard. It had been so long since we’d felt excited about anyone that we started to worry that the problem was with us. A handful of years ago, some friends and I were all in the midst of a romantic drought.
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